Effect of Seed Treatment on Seed Germination Areca nut (Areca catechu Linnaeus) Palm
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Date
2013
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Uva Wellassa University of Sri Lanka
Abstract
Areca nut (Areca catechu) palm is an evergreen plant which is highly restricted to the warmer
regions of the world. There are numerous uses of Areca nut palm as food, fuel, timber, boundary
plant (George et al., 2006) and landscaping palm (Orwa et al., 2009). As an ornamental palm,
currently, Sri Lanka has great demand in export market because of their aesthetic and enormous
tropical appearance, especially from Middle- East countries. Also it has higher local demand as
landscaping plant and a boundary plant in agricultural fields. Ornamental palm exporters export
100,000 to 150,000 areca nut seedlings in one consignment. Seed germination is not uniform in
large scale production of areca nut seedlings. Normally, it takes five to six months to germinate
and inherently these palms have low germination percentage which is around 25% to 30%.
Because of the low germination percentage of areca nut palm, growers have to sow at least
250,000 to 300,000 areca nut seeds to get 100,000 seedlings. Therefore, growers confronted
many difficulties in nursery management of areca nut palm. Byusing proper treatments for seeds
and controlling the temperature and moisture of the planting media, germination percentage can
be significantly increased up to 80% to 90% and time taken to germinate can be reduced up to 3
to 4 weeks. As a result, seed requirement and cost of production can be significantly reduced.
This will be a massive assistance for the palm growers of ornamental palm industry in Sri
Lanka. Therefore, in this study, it attempts to find out the effect of seed treatment on seed
germination in seed propagation of areca nut palms.
Methodology
In the experiment, 576 areca nut seeds were taken. As seed treatments, three di fferent soaking
times: 24 hrs, 48 hrs and 72 hrs without soaking as control treatment were used. Black
polythene, straw and paddy husk were used as mulching materials and control experiment kept
without mulch. Coir dust and sand were taken as growing media in 1:1 ratio. Twelve seeds were
sown in vertical position with calyx end covered in each plastic tray (Sheshagiri et al., 2004)for
each treatment with different seed treatments and three replicates. All trays were kept in shade
house. Temperature and Relative Humidity in shade house and temperature under mulching
materials were measured in two days intervals. Rooting was observed daily and first sight of
root emerging was taken as start of seed germination.
Description
Keywords
Agriculture, Export Agriculture, Crop Production, Plantations